WEDNESDAY EVENING

In placid, affluent West Point Grey, where the Beauchamps lived, cherry trees were celebrating spring’s return with pink bouquets, and daffodils lined the boulevards like dabs of sunshine in the rain. Driving up the lane to his sturdy old brick home, Arthur remembered that his backyard garden needed to be prepared for planting, rain or shine. That, he resolved, was how he would spend the bulk of the weekend — gardening seemed the only soothing pastime he had left.

He pulled into the double garage beside Annabelle’s Porsche, picked up his heavy briefcase, and went in, stepping carefully over large sheets of set plans and sketches arrayed across the living room floor: Annabelle’s homework. Tristan and Isolde. Opening next week, Thursday.

He was pleased to observe that Deborah was also doing her homework — she was in his den, tapping away at a bulky new Wang computer, a device that her parents hadn’t quite figured out. “This is so neat,” she’d said on first trying it. “It even corrects your spelling.”

She broke free to give him a hug. “Can you handle alone, Dad? Mom’s dropping me off for skating.” She had a figure skater’s figure, leggy, limber. Also green hair these days, to go with her green eyes.

“Sure, I can handle alone. I feel terrific. You just worry about your lutzes.”

He was feeling soiled by his immersion in Regina v. Skyler and was looking forward to a long, cleansing soak in the bathtub. He found Annabelle upstairs in the master bedroom, dressing for an evening out.

“Don’t want to smudge,” she said, with a touch of her lips to his. She was thirty-nine, as striking as when he met her eighteen years ago: still svelte, wide mouthed, with large, teasing eyes, and a crop of black hair cut short this month. Eighteen years, and she still gave him palpitations. They used to be just tremors of love, but later, love and hurt.

“I’m sorry, it came up suddenly. The board is insisting I attend the fundraiser at the Media Club. Per Gustavson will be there, signing albums and cassettes.”

“Ah, your gifted heldentenor.”

“If you won’t feel too ill at ease at a cocktail do, darling, you have just enough time to change.”

The invitation wasn’t emphatic, but Arthur welcomed it nonetheless as a gesture at togetherness. It had been three years since her last extramarital frolic: a thirty-year-old abstract artist, undiscovered and likely forever to be. She preferred younger men. There was only one upside to that: Arthur would have felt even more diminished if her lovers had been his age. But in preparing for her forties, she seemed to have put her restless, reckless years behind her, emboldening Arthur’s hopes. He was almost willing to believe.

“I would be poor company. I shall be in my den obsessing over the trial.”

“You’re holding out okay?”

“It’s hard not to feel the pressure.” He showed her a story in the day’s Sun: “Leading Counsel Takes on Thrill Kill Rerun.” Pictured was fifty-year-old A.R. Beauchamp, QC, in his robes, tall, gangly, and hawk-beaked, overconfidently snapping his suspenders.

As she read this backgrounder, he undressed in the bathroom and began filling the tub.

“Oh my God, Arthur. Talk about divulging. ‘He candidly admitted to having had alcohol problems.’”

“The reporter bluntly put it to me. I’d have looked the fool by equivocating.” Prospective jurors would have read that too, but Arthur felt no shame in it. “Tell Mr. Gustavson I look forward to seeing his Tristan and that I have a tape of his Siegfried that I very much like.” The tenor was a bull of a man, Swedish, much in demand in Europe. “How old would you say he is?”

“Why?”

“He seems to have just gotten widely known.”

“Not yet thirty-five. Most of the great ones don’t mature until they’re in their forties. Like lawyers, darling. Do me up.”

He was down to his underwear when he approached her and began fumbling with a zipper at the back. “You look quite smashing, dear.” He felt a touch of Eros as his fingers met her skin, and there came an unexpected erection. She felt it too, and playfully pressed her rump against his loins.

“I love you too, darling. Just hold on to that until I get back.”

He forced himself to laugh with her as he returned quickly to the bathroom, flustered. Yet it was a good sign, that brief, humble erection, proof of healing vitality. There’d been a long period when his penis had vastly underperformed, a time of weariness and depression. As the tides are controlled by the moon, his capabilities tended to rise and fall according to current cuckoldry conditions.

As he lay in the tub, soaping himself, images came of Annabelle offering herself, and his cock rose again, unaided, like a periscope. Then came a wave of performance anxiety, and it descended.

§

Wrapped in a terry cloth robe, he went down to his den, selected a tape of Liszt études and settled into his club chair with the Skyler file. He pulled out the photographs first. Mug shots rarely flatter, but in his, Randolph Skyler looked handsome, if defiant. A morgue shot showed Joyal Chumpy’s blanched, pudgy body, drained of blood through seven stab wounds. Photos from the crime scene were even more repellent: a room that announced impoverishment and alcoholism and savage, senseless murder. Chumpy was sprawled on a ratty, blood-soaked single bed, a litter of empty beer bottles beside it. The scene inspired Arthur to double down on his pledge.

He gathered up the several volumes of transcripts of the previous trial, and began making notes for a cross-examination that might never happen unless he could force Skyler into the witness box. The Crown hadn’t been able to do so last time.

He would have to deal with the miscounted beer bottles — the bumbling over them in the first trial had enabled the defence to hang the jury. Arthur opened the last transcript to the summing-up by defence counsel Brian Pomeroy:

“Okay, so we have one of the crime scene guys telling you he collected twelve empties from that room. And they found an empty twelve-pack. Then after they remove all the exhibits to the lab, they find a thirteenth beer. It’s half-empty, same brand, Coors, and it’s supposedly sitting on a window ledge behind a curtain. And when did they find it? Nobody could remember. It’s missing from their notes. Conveniently, it’s the only bottle that has not been wiped clean by the real murderer, and even more conveniently it’s got a partial print on it that they say matches the right thumb of the accused. Let’s call him the wrongly accused. Or more accurately, the falsely accused. Ask yourself, each of you: Are you willing to take a chance on convicting this young graduate student of this unspeakable crime over something that smells as bad as this?”

Bravo, Brian.

This gifted young counsel had cleverly wangled a mid-December date for Randolph Skyler’s first trial by agreeing to waive a preliminary hearing “so we can get him out for Christmas.” He knew jurors were at their most merciful just before holiday season.

Pomeroy had done his utmost to discredit the Crown’s star witness — tonight’s late-arriving Manfred Unger — then gambled by electing to call no evidence. The case went to the jury after two days, and after three more they were unable to bring in a unanimous verdict.

Arthur had shared several courtrooms with Brian Pomeroy and admired the young sharpshooter’s skills, although he found him somewhat neurotic — though not in any damaging way. An edgy, cynical chatterbox.

Arthur looked out the window at the empty street. Annabelle would likely be late, but Deborah was usually home by now, nine-thirty.

Back to his cross. Would Skyler come across as a spoiled brat? That was Arthur’s sense of him. How did an only child of well-to-do parents decide to kill a total stranger for no reason? A virile young man, attractive to women, according to police interviews, but faithless. There’d been a string of broken hearts and one broken engagement.

It was nearing a quarter to ten, and Deborah’s lateness was making him lose focus. He finally relaxed when a familiar Dodge pickup pulled into the driveway, driven by Nels Jensen, her coach, a former pairs champion at some level or other. The engine was stilled and lights turned off, and his anxiety swelled as the minutes dragged past. Jensen was probably just offering her some final pointers on her inside edge spirals. The upper leg must be extended just so, he was saying. Running his hand up that leg. Stroking it … If she wasn’t out of that truck in two seconds …

She jumped out, laughing. Arthur felt foolish; obviously Jensen had needed time to finish a joke or anecdote. Arthur hurried back to his club chair before Deborah could catch him at the window.

“G’night, Dad,” she said at his doorway. “Don’t work too hard, it sets a bad example.”

He took that to heart and unfolded a half-completed New York Times Sunday crossword.

§

At around midnight, Arthur woke to find himself slumped in his chair, still clutching pencil and puzzle. He rubbed his eyes and rose to go to bed. Without thinking, reacting from habit, he first opened the liquor cabinet, but of course it was bare.

Their bed was empty, unrumpled, sans Annabelle, and he was unable to sleep for nearly two hours, until she returned. He lay still, his eyes closed, as she took a protracted shower. When she slipped between the sheets, he could smell soap and liquor. Maybe something else, something like spent heat. She didn’t try to arouse him. He fought for sleep and finally found it.